The Three Stages To Completing SEO On Your Recipe Posts

I love search engine optimisation and the results it can bring to my blog posts. I do a little of SEO housekeeping and then the search engines do the rest for me!

Win-Win situation if you ask me!!!!

But as a new food blogger (or one whose SEO has never really taken off) it is all about going through these stages like clockwork each time you submit a recipe post so that you get the best possible SEO positions for the amazing recipe that you have just published.

Stage 1 – Is Your Content SEO Friendly?

The first thing you need to make sure of is that you have your keyword in the correct places and that Google will notice this enough for you to rank for it.

The main areas are:

Title – Your keyword must be at the beginning of the title so that it is easy to be picked up by search engines.

At least one heading with your keyword – it is very important that your keyword features in a heading 1, heading 2, heading 3 or heading 4 subtitle. This is rather easy to do and I find that it structures the content better

At least one bold mention – At some point in your recipe you need to bold your keyword.

A total of five keyword mentions – Throughout your content including headings and bolds you should have five mentions of your keyword. Or if the content is really large increase this accordingly.

Avoid small blog posts – when you do a recipe there is bound to be similar recipes out there. They will have a 100 word introduction followed by the recipe. To get a higher ranking in the search engines you will need yours to be longer than the others. Therefore aim for a minimum of 300 words for your introduction followed by the recipe itself.

All In One SEO – You also need to make sure you fill in your SEO details on your Plugin. We use all in one SEO Plugin but there are many others out there. It basically gives you an area to add your blog title, description and tags.

If you thought of Google as a directory it is like adding your title and description so that people can find you and it does help along the way!

This is an example of it on one of our recipes:

Stage 2 – The Pictures

The pictures are a main part of a recipe and you want to make sure they are A) of good quality B) edited for SEO just like you would with the main recipe of your blog.

It only takes me about five minutes to get my pictures ready for SEO (sometimes less than that) and because of the SEO results you can get, it is well worth the time. And don’t forget your recipes you create could easily be bringing in traffic via Google Images.

Rename the image after your keyword – if you have multiple images in one post then choose different variations of your keyword. This will then mean that when you upload your image the url of your image will also have your keyword in it. Then this same rule will apply for your blog post url as it does this automatically after you’ve added the title.

Fill in your recipe image details – when you load an image on your blog there will be the option to add image details. This includes adding tags, description and alt tags. It is important that you fill this in as it tells Google more about your image.

Here is an example of it on one of our posts:

Make sure your image social friendly – It is important that your image is social media friendly. The end goal is to get a lot of social media shares and the best way of doing this is making amazing images that are perfect for social media sites and then those images will get shared multiple times. On previous websites I have always had the best results for SEO positions for recipes where the images have had more than a thousand repins.

Make sure the image isn’t too big – Now this is a big deal and one of the biggest problems on food blogs. The issue that way too many blogs are loading so many extra large pictures on their blog posts that their sites are running way too slow. This then means to less people will want to share the images and the reader won’t come back. I have seen several food blogs were they’ll have more than 3 huge images, when if they had 2 good ones that would bring better results.

Stage 3 – Share It First

It is important that you are the original creator of the content and that Google ranks you first. Therefore as soon as your blog post has been published make sure that you share it straight away on social media.

This also kickstarts all the social media sharing and can help drive traffic to the recipe. I will then re-promote via social media over a certain period of time, depending on the popularity of the recipe.

If you follow these three stages you’ll have no problem creating good quality SEO positions and remember your competition is doing this right now and you need to think carefully over how you are doing things right now!

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We’re The Milners

Hello we’re the Milners and we run RecipeThis.com from our country cottage in Southern Portugal. The Milners is made up of husband and wife duo Dominic & Samantha along with their kids Kyle, Sofia & Jorge. They love cooking with local Mediterranean ingredients and are addicted to chocolate. If they could cook for the rest of their lives with just kitchen gadgets then they would!.

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